


Y sueño llagar a tu alma tocar

by fig_eater



Category: Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: But also not, Canon Compliant, Canonical Character Death, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-12-26
Updated: 2016-12-26
Packaged: 2018-09-12 09:05:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,439
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9065224
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/fig_eater/pseuds/fig_eater
Summary: They say when you die, your entire life flashes before your eyes. For Cassian Andor, this included the life he sacrificed.





	

He knelt on the beach, breathing heavily, gripping tightly to Jyn. They held each other up, supported each other's body weight against the crippling exhaustion threatening to collapse them both. Hot wind swirled past them, approaching constantly from the brightening horizon. Cassian's fingers dug into the nape of Jyn's neck, pulling her close. He pressed his face into the warm skin just below her jawline and reveled in the feeling of her hair on his face. Cassian let his eyes slip shut and breathed in, letting his lips press against her, focusing only on the way she felt against him, the way she gripped him fiercely and let her ragged breathing fall into rhythm with his.

He was six, being dragged away from his mother's corpse, deaf to the horrendous shrieking escaping him.

He was twelve, and he had killed his first storm trooper. He vomited until nothing could possibly be left in his body, and couldn't sleep for weeks afterward.

He was sixteen and had successfully lead his first reconnaissance mission. He had only lost two men, which they said was a blessing, considering the danger. He drank until his eyes swam and he grabbed the first woman to try and drown his pain in. A part of him had wished for it to be special; a more practical part understood he was using her and being used, that there was no sentimentality past a moment's feeling, and that this was what people did during wars - there was no time for anything other than that moment. In another time, he thought, maybe he would have loved.

He was twenty and he was moving up the ranks of Alliance Intelligence. He was seated in a small cantina, drinking with a contact, thinking to himself that in a different life, he might have loved music. In this life, he fought back the bile that rose in his throat every time he killed someone.

He was twenty four and he had finished reprogramming a stolen Imperial droid. Part of the consequences of this was that the droid had bypassed any sort of filter program that it may have previously had, and as a result, Cassian had quite possibly the rudest droid in the galaxy as a partner. He had never had a friend before.

He was twenty six, and instead of dying in the arms of the woman he might have loved, he was being thrown unceremoniously into a rebel transport ship. He looked over at where Jyn had landed on the floor of the small ship next to him. The ship sped away from the explosion, barely clearing the atmosphere before being shot into hyperspace. As they narrowly escaped death at the hands of the weapon for a second time, Cassian gripped Jyn's hand tightly, trying to understand the look on her face. He had never seen untarnished joy before.

He was twenty seven and his arms encircled Jyn, teeth dragging along her collarbone, her legs wrapped around his hips. She dragged her nails across his back, eliciting a guttural moan from the back of Cassian's throat. He squeezed his eyes shut, feeling a blinding white heat in his core as he heard Jyn cry his name and felt her grasp a handful of his hair. He half-collapsed on top of her, lost in the feeling of their bodies entwined, all too aware of her hands stroking his cheek. Cassian opened his eyes to look at her, searching her eyes for meaning, for feeling, for belonging; she returned his gaze with a look full of trust. His breath caught in his throat as he realized that, somehow, he had been lucky enough to know love.

He was thirty and he was being awarded the Alliance's highest honor. Jyn was by his side, receiving the same award. They tried to smile, but could not; both of them felt the heavy loss of the souls not present. Their reward for their work was being forcefully retired as valued Rebellion heroes. No one would say it to their faces, but they had lost something vital on that beach. Mon Mothma had tried to keep them on as long as possible afterward, but at a certain point even she recognized that Cassian's stare was unfocused more often than not, that Jyn was startled too easily and wandered the halls of the base at night, that the two of them were heard screaming in the dead of night when they slept, if they slept.

He was thirty two and he and Jyn had settled on a small farming planet as far away from others as they could get without completely cutting themselves off. Once Jyn had shared that she had lived on a farm as a child, Cassian couldn't shake the idea of giving her what she had had taken from her. He wanted to provide for her, wanted her to feel safe, feel secure in their anonymity. Cassian, for his part, had never enjoyed the idea of farming, but he soon found the mindless physical work soothing; the less time he spent in his head, the better. At nights he pulled Jyn close, buried himself in her, tried to only exist in the smell of her hair and the taste of her lips. Sometimes he would wake up in the middle of the night, drenched in sweat, having dreamt of Jyn dying. He would wake her immediately and hold her so tightly he worried about suffocating her. She would press her lips to his eyelids and caress his hair and hold him so tightly he worried about running out of air himself.

He was thirty six and Jyn was screaming, a sound he had never wanted to hear and vowed to never hear again. She cried out in agony as their daughter passed between her hips, joining her mother's wailing with her own. Cassian felt his heart shatter and mend itself all in one fell swoop; he had never had a frame of reference for any sort of real happiness in his previous life, but now - now he truly understood what he had been fighting for all those years.

He was forty and clinging to his daughter tightly. She had had a bad dream and was crying into Cassian's arms. He rocked her in his arms and muttered soothing words to her, and as he did so, he caught Jyn's eyes. The look of empathy and exhaustion in her eyes mirrored his own, and he couldn't help but smile widely at her as he realized that their daughter would never know anything more upsetting than the occasional nightmare.

He was forty five and he could not sleep. His old, unhealed injuries flared up with pressure shifts in the atmosphere, and he'd been having the old nightmares as well. He tried to lay still in bed, running his hands over Jyn slowly, possessively, listening to her breathing for hours. Close to dawn, her breath hitched and she started jerking against him, and he knew she was having the nightmares as well. He gripped her tightly, and at the first sign of her waking up, he gently pulled her close and began kissing her neck, pressing his lips to the warm skin right below her jawline, whispering to her that she was safe, that she was home. Jyn entwined her fingers with his and muttered half-coherently about how much she loved him as he pressed inside her insistently, needing to ground himself in her. Jyn gripped tightly to him, gasping for air as he pulled them both back down into reality.

He was fifty seven and Jyn held him in her arms. His life had been hard on him, and he had considered anything past the age of six as living on borrowed time. When it finally came time to accept that it was his time to pass, the only thing he could think about was the way he had held Jyn on a beach a lifetime ago, convinced his last moments would be moments of agony. Instead, he lay in his bed, surrounded by Jyn and their child, knowing that he had truly found happiness in his life.

Cassian felt the hot wind whipping his face and he pulled Jyn imperceptibly closer to him as he finally opened his eyes. The life he might have had had played out in the space of a moment; he had less than half a second to revel in what could have been. Everything was being obscured by a blinding white light, and the last thing Cassian felt was the calm understanding that he was, at last, at peace.


End file.
